Royal baby sketch: 'Breaking news: we have no news!'

Michael Deacon sympathises with reporters on 24-hour TV news, as they cover
the birth of the royal baby.

Stepladders belonging to photographers are set up on the pavement opposite the entrance to the the Lindo Wing where the Duchess of Cambridge will give birth at St Mary's Hospital in London.Photo: Getty Images

Amid all the excitement, spare a thought for the people who are spending today working against the clock, under desperately high pressure, to give the country the news it’s dying to hear. Not the Duchess of Cambridge’s medical team – the reporters on 24-hour TV news.

The slog began around 7.30am. From the start, one man decided that he might as well come clean. “Plenty more to come from here,” promised the BBC News channel’s Simon McCoy, stationed outside St Mary’s hospital. “None of it news, of course, but that won’t stop us!” He continued in this disarmingly frank vein well into the afternoon. “The world’s media have gathered to report that there is no news… Let’s speculate, because that’s all we can do… Breaking news: we have no news…”

In desperation he turned to a colleague. “With me is our royal correspondent, Peter Hunt. Peter, what news?” Peter Hunt: “No news.”

You had to sympathise. As a matter of fact, I admired them. Talking on live television for hours on end, when you’ve got no fresh information to impart, takes a certain sort of skill, particularly if the presenter in the studio has just asked you an unanswerable question. On the BBC, one poor reporter was asked what name the Duke and Duchess might give their child. “I think the chances are they’ve got a shortlist of names,” she replied. “I think they’ll probably go for something quite traditional.”

Royal expert Nicholas Witchell was asked what sort of care the Duchess could expect in St Mary’s private, £6,000-a-night Lindo wing. “Well,” he replied reassuringly, “I think we can assume it’ll be very good care.”

Excitement at 11am, as one reporter managed to grab a word with the Prince of Wales, who happened to be visiting York’s National Railway Museum. “That comment from Prince Charles was quite interesting,” revealed the reporter afterwards. “He says that like the rest of us he has no news.”

Back to Peter Hunt, who was wisely hedging his bets. “All I can safely say,” he said, “is that it will be either a boy or a girl.”

Over on Sky News, hopes were raised, only to be cruelly dashed. “Paul!” cried Kay Burley at royal reporter Paul Harrison. “Your phone rang a moment ago. A tip?”

Still, Paul did have some news. The Prince of Wales, he said, would be kept up-to-date on “every movement”. Pause. “Well, not every movement – he will be spared some of the details.”

In the eyes of the indefatigable Kay, however, the public should be spared no detail at all. She had, she informed us, inquired about the royal cervix. “I asked how many centimetres, but they said it’s not the kind of information they give out.”

It was all starting to feel a little surreal, particularly when at lunchtime Sky News brought us a close-up of beefy anchor Adam Boulton accompanied by the caption ROYAL BABY. Back to the BBC, where Charles Anson, the Queen’s former press secretary, was calling this “the people’s pregnancy”, and Simon McCoy, presumably in the interests of balance, was reading out complaints from republicans. “‘What a lot of sycophantic rubbish,’ says one…”

Sky’s viewers, by contrast, seemed to be having a whale of a time. One woman, announced Kay Burley, had emailed to tell them that she was enjoying their coverage so much that “I’ve cancelled my hospital appointment.”